This invention relates to telecommunication services. In particular, this invention relates to a method of reducing financial losses suffered by telecommunications service providers from fraudulent, long-duration calls.
Telecommunication service providers are frequently the victims of a variety of fraud schemes. One type of fraud is the long-duration call where a party initiates a call to another party and then maintains the call for hours and perhaps even days. During the course of a long-duration call, the caller frequently collects money from others for their use of the connection to the called location.
These long-duration calls are problematic for service providers because the telecommunications industry""s network design philosophy prioritized the connection and maintenance of calls regardless of duration, not the tearing down of calls. Fraud-motivated individuals have taken advantage of the public switched telephone network""s (PSTN) inability to terminate a call after it is made by initiating a call and thereafter never hanging up the phone. In many instances, these creative thieves sell communication service to others who wish to communicate with someone at the far end of the connection.
Once a call is established between a calling party and a called party, it is a very difficult, often manual, process for a service provider or a switching equipment operator to terminate a call through the PSTN. While call continuity is certainly essential, from the perspective of telecommunications service providers, the inability to terminate a call has at least one drawback, namely the inability to easily terminate long-duration calls.
Prior art fraud-prevention techniques attempt to prevent a fraudulent call from being made. Unfortunately, these prior art techniques are unable to identify in-progress calls as being fraudulent.
Some of the prior art fraud-prevention techniques are merely sound business practices that include credit checks of the credit worthiness of a subscriber; but even with these credit checks of prospective customers, fraudulent long-duration calls still occur. In many instances, telephone calling cards issued to legitimate customers are sometimes lost by, or stolen from, legitimate customers. A stolen calling card number enables the unauthorized calling card number user to place fraudulent calls. Legitimate businesses might have phone lines unknowingly tapped by determined service thieves and have long-duration calls debited to the business number.
In the case of long-distance services, an unscrupulous individual is able to place long-distance calls to virtually any location. Since most telecommunications service providers bill on a monthly basis, they will not know if they will get paid until weeks or months after the fraudulent calls. In any given monthly billing cycle, an unscrupulous user is able to use tens of thousands of dollars worth of long-distance telephone service. By re-selling phone service (even at steeply discounted rates) an unscrupulous customer may collect lots of money.
A method by which an in-progress call might be identified as fraudulent and thereafter stopped would be an improvement over the prior art. A method by which calls are evaluated on a call-by-call basis might provide system-wide fraud protection and further prevent fraud.
There is provided herein a method for detecting and reducing fraudulent calls in-progress through a telecommunications network.
Call duration is tracked by reading one or more database records wherein the start time of calls is recorded. After some predetermined amount of time has elapsed, data records that indicate whether a call is still being carried are checked. The predetermined time interval between the start time of a call and a subsequent check can be empirically determined to be sufficiently long such that calls that exceed this first threshold value are suspected to be fraudulent.
If after this first threshold time period has elapsed and the call is still in progress, then the call""s status as a long-duration call can be brought to the attention of the telecommunications service provider for appropriate handling. Handling of a long-duration call may include monitoring it for fraudulent characteristics such as voice and/or data, and determining the number of different voices using the channel. If the service provider decides that the call is likely fraudulent, then the call may be terminated, manually or automatically.
In the preferred embodiment, the circuits through which a long-duration call is carried are identified. Equipped with such information, a service provider can terminate the call by appropriate instruction to the central processor controlling the circuits carrying the call.